Traditional broadcast television is a single orientation point to a plurality of destination points system in which the same television signal is broadcast to each person viewing a particular station. Thus, each person viewing a particular channel will necessarily view the same programming content as well as the same advertisements embedded in the programming content. For most broadcast medium industries, such as television, advertising revenues may be the sole source of revenues for the television broadcaster. In a conventional television broadcast system, many advertisers compete for the opportunity to place their advertisement in the advertisement breaks between the programming content. In addition, once a particular advertising break has been filled with an advertisement, the television broadcaster can no longer sell that space in the broadcast stream. Because the advertisements on a particular channel are seen by every viewer tuned to the particular channel in a conventional television system, the advertisements in a conventional television broadcast system cannot be targeted to a particular portion of the audience or even to a particular individual. Therefore, the television broadcast operator may only derive a limited predetermined amount of advertising revenue from any particular advertisement spot. It is desirable to provide the broadcaster with a system for increasing the advertisement revenues that may be generated.
The problem with advertisements on a conventional television broadcasting system for the advertiser is that each advertiser is interested in reaching only one or more subsets of the total viewing audience because not all members of the viewing audience may be desirable candidates for receiving a particular advertisement. For example, an advertisement about a product for male hair growth would typically be directed to males because males are more likely to purchase the product. The proportion of the audience which is thought to be genuinely interested in the advertisement (or believed by the advertiser to be a prime candidate to purchase their product) varies by product category, but normally ranges from 20-40%. Therefore, the advertisement viewed by the other 60-80% of the audience, which are not prime candidates, represents a large amount of wasted spending by the advertiser. Therefore, it is desirable to provide a system which permits an advertiser to more carefully direct advertisements to a particular set of people or even to an individual person so that the advertiser does not waste large sums of money on parts of the audience which do not have any interest in their product. Thus, both television broadcasters and advertisers desire a better way in which to provide advertisements to the audience in a more targeted manner.
The emerging digital television media, in various forms such as digital cable, direct broadcast satellite and wireless cable, provide opportunities for advertisers to better target their advertising messages and provide more opportunities for broadcasters to generate more advertising revenues for a number of reasons. With digital television media, the total viewing audience may be divided into many subgroups based on common interests or common demographic descriptors. Advertising targeting is also possible with digital television media due to an expansion in the bandwidth capacity of the broadcast from 8-100 channels in typical analog television, to 200 or more channels in digital. In addition, targeting of the advertisement is further enabled by the capability of a digital set-top box to serve as a storage medium wherein the storage medium may be used to store advertisements to be displayed to the user.
There is a need for a method, apparatus and system to utilize the additional bandwidth and the storage capability of the STB to better target ads to groups, families and/or individual subscribers. Moreover, there is a need for individual household data about viewing preferences and the like to be captured, stored, uploaded to the broadcaster and used to further improve the targeting of the advertising messages.